What Developers Want

Simmons added: "Im aware of the new APIs, though, so I have a good idea of which ones I want to work with. Im certainly interested in Core Animation, which is public knowledge, but Im not sure that other APIs Im interested in are public knowledge."
Jeff Ganyard, an engineer at Salem, N.H.-based MacSpeech, said that hes looking forward to learning more about Scripting Bridge, a new-for-Leopard developers tool.

"Scripting Bridge makes it much easier for developers to generate and send Apple Events," said Ganyard, who noted that MacSpeechs iListen voice recognition products use "a lot" of automation.

"As a developer, Id like to see continued enhancement and extension of Mac OS Xs Accessibility APIs," Ganyard said. These allow access to many of the operating systems and applications enhanced display and other accessibility features.
Read more here about the first alpha test release of a Mac-native OpenOffice.
"Were all looking forward to those secret features," he added, "but honestly, were pretty happy with whats in there right now."

Gus Mueller, of Seattle-based Mac software company Flying Meat, said he has been developing for Leopard but not exclusively.
"Realistically," he said," Id love to have a 10.5 [Leopard] build where everything is nice and stable so I can work with Leopard full-time. [The10.5 version] is alpha and theres a reason why it was pushed back a couple of months."
"Some of the stuff thats new (that I can talk about) that I really, really want to use are new features in Xcode, and the new profiling app "Xray" (along with dtrace). That thing is a dream," Mueller said.
He added: "The new ribbon in Xcode is going to help out a lot, and inline error messages as well. Xray is awesome because it lets you use different performance instruments at the same time (disk usage, memory, cpu load, etc.), and then you can scroll through it in a GarageBand-like UI. Its very slick."
Mueller also said that hed also ultimately like to see "some innovation" in Mac OS Xs Finder. "Its pretty much the same Finder weve had since System 7, isnt it? Theres got to be some innovation in that area."
William Jon Shipley, who develops the cataloging application Delicious Library for Delicious Monster, also of Seattle, seemed more sanguine than his colleagues.
"Apples publicly announced theyll show a feature-complete Leopard at WWDC, which is pretty much all I want at this point, honestly," he said. "I sure dont want them to rush it and announce that its shipping, or anything."
"I guess my biggest pie-in-the-sky dream," he added, "would be if Jobs gives all the attendees iPhones. Thatd be, like, pretty damn cool."
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